Belief Systems – The ‘Objective’ Mind – Foreign Travel And Cultures – The Search For Meaning – Consciousness Expansion – Higher Education – Religion – Law
The Ninth House At A Glance
House Classification: Mutable
Opposite House: Third
Natural Ruler: Jupiter
Natural Ruler: Sagittarius
Core Meaning: Expanding Self-Awareness through broadening horizons
Outer Meanings: Philosophy of Life, travel, higher education
The ninth house endeavours to give meaning to all seemingly random experiences of life by incorporating them into a coherent set of beliefs or universal truths. In many ways, this house develops the themes of the eight house by synthesizing our experience of others, and what these encounters teach us about ourselves, in to ideas about the nature of existence.
This explains the ninth’s traditional link with religion. Philosophy and the law, as all these disciplines address the question of where we as individuals fit into the greater scheme of things.
In a sense, the ninth house is the polar opposite of the third. Whereas the third deals with our instinctive mental programming, the ninth ventures into unfamiliar territory, broadening the mind through ‘journeys’ that increase our awareness of the universe and, hopefully, our place in it.
These unfamiliar journeys can be literal, taking us to foreign lands, but more often than not they symbolize consciousness-expanding pursuits: further education, spiritual enlightenment, hallucinogenic trips – in fact, anything that gives us fresh insight into the nature of existence.
It is the ability to give meaning, to conceptualize, that distinguishes the mental activities of the ninth house to the third. In the ninth we enter the realm of the ‘objective’ mind – which deals with where we stand in relation to the whole – as opposed to the ‘subjective’ min d of the third, which simply defines our relationship to our immediate surroundings.
Planets in the Ninth House:
Planets in the ninth are often ‘systems orientated’, in the sense that they look for basic patters or laws that underpin existence. For example Saturn might want to investigate the physical laws of the universe, while Neptune may be drawn to look for spiritual truths. On the other hand, planets here may simply denote a love of travel and foreign cultures.
Reference: Felix Lyle and Bryan Aspland
